I Am Never Alone

Feeling the weighted effects of a heat wave and watching "Parts Unknown" featuring Anthony Bourdain traveling the world to places I have never heard of or could find on a map, eating food that looks exactly like what I want to shove in my mouth for breakfast, lunch, dinner...snacks...whenever...I am restlessly thinking about all of the creative things I could be doing.  I should be working on the painting I started 6 months ago that I am still very much interested in finishing.  I should be writing in the journal which is collecting dust and is more of an old relic than a journal considering the neglect and underuse it suffers.  I could be designing cakes or writing a business plan or thinking about my business in productive ways instead of just panicking about what I'm not doing or thinking or planning or designing.  I think about how old Anthony Bourdain looks and realize that I will also look very old some day, but today is not that day, and then I realize that I'm 31, and I am not 20 and I am not that young anymore...but I am so much less of an asshole than I was when I was 20 and for that I am thankful.

Then I realize that I am not doing any of these things because I am relishing my time spent alone, doing nothing but watching something that I love to feast my eyes and my brain upon, and thinking.  Perhaps a few hours, every two weeks, I get time away from my beloved husband...and during that time I am usually with Dexter, who while not acting like a lump on the floor is begging me to tend to his needs...whether it be rolling his ball across the floor for him to fetch and refuse to give up for me to roll again until I give up and relocate and then he pushes his ball off of his bed across the floor and under the couch, where he then lays on his side and scratches at the leather couch until I get up and get his ball for him....repeat.  His needs are few.  But still, I relish my time spent not tending to them.

How many hours are there in a year?  Subtract 2 of them and whatever that number is, there is no one I would rather spend them with than Jesse.  But still, those few hours I get to myself are few and far between and when I have them, only then do I realize how sparse and cherished they are.  I used to spend so much time by myself, before I was really an adult with obligations and a partner in life, and I would write and draw and paint and CREATE!  Oh how I would CREATE!  And it was all shit, all of it, but I loved every minute of it, every juvenile, talentless minute of it, and I thought it was so important.  The problem with being an artist is that no matter what you are doing, you think it matters.  Guess what kids, it doesn't matter to nearly as many people as you think it does.  But that doesn't matter, all that matters is that it is important to you.  And now that I don't have time to do anything that I actually want to do....it is all the more important to me.  To hear my own thoughts, even though I don't really like all of them, it is a thing of beauty to have thoughts that are not shared, that are not worth sharing, that if Jesse were here I would tell him about and he would either care or not care, and it doesn't even matter, because he will never hear these thoughts.  Nor will he read them, because someone so close to you does not need to read your thoughts in a blog, he knows them already.  Because I am never alone.